


Something Wicked

by 3to40characters_nospaces



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Brief Depictions of Violence, F/M, I think I know what I'm doing, K2 and Jyn are relegated to a cameo, OFC POV, Prison, Unrequited Love, just trust me, mentioned child death, technically an everyone lives AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-26 01:30:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17132471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3to40characters_nospaces/pseuds/3to40characters_nospaces
Summary: But when she looks at the rebel, fighting and baring his teeth in a feral grin, even as they shock and kick him, he gives her hope. Not really for herself, but for him and for the galaxy. If men like this one are the kind standing against the Empire, perhaps there is a chance after all.





	Something Wicked

The rebel is sharp and lean. When the ‘troopers fight with him, Dalien counts each of his ribs. She counts scars and wounds. She tries to keep track of how long he fights and she thinks that every time it gets longer. He fights and fights like he has something beyond this, some kind of hope of ever leaving this place.

Dalien doesn’t. She gave up long ago, accepted her fate and, in some ways, that makes it easier. But when she looks at the rebel, fighting and baring his teeth in a feral grin, even as they shock and kick him, he gives her hope. Not really for herself, but for him and for the galaxy. If men like this one are the kind standing against the Empire, perhaps there is a chance after all. 

So she watches as he gets more wounds, more scars, as he fights and grins his terrible grin and spits blood and curses at the ‘troopers and, deep down in her heart, she cheers every time he stands up.

 

~~

 

After a while, the prison gets too full for even the high security prisoners to get their own cells. The ‘troopers put the rebel in with Dalien. She thinks it’s because she’s been quiet and docile for a long time, that maybe they think that she’ll be a good influence on him, or that it will be hard for him to stir her up because she’s already so broken.

She thinks that if that is the case, then they are in for a nasty surprise. If the rebel asked her, she would fight just as hard as he does. 

She tries not to think of her first few months here. She tries not to think of her first cell mate, lying in a puddle of blood, the salty, coppery taste of it coating Dalien’s mouth, the phantom feeling of skin tearing away under teeth lingering for days after.

She tries not to think that CT-4358 remembered her and hoped that she would kill the rebel like she killed the thief. 

At least the rebel spits his own blood. 

 

~~

 

The rebel tells her that his name is Andor. She’s not sure if it’s his first or family or if it’s even real. She is sure that it doesn’t really matter. 

The ‘troopers come for him at random times. Sometimes, there are hours between, sometimes days. Once, they toss him in the cell only to come for him again 20 minutes later. 

Every time, he meets them on his feet, grin on his face, wild and fierce.

Every time, she loves him a little more. 

 

~~

 

One night, they throw Andor in and he doesn’t get up. He’d been gone almost a day and a half. And Dalien had heard his screams all the way in their cell. 

Andor lays on the hard Durasteel, just breathing and shivering for a long time. Dalien doesn’t know how to help, worries that she would only make things worse, so she stays on her bunk and struggles with her breaking heart. 

Eventually, he groans, mutters something she doesn’t understand and pushes himself up onto his knees. 

Dalien watches him, kneeling on the floor, fighting to control his breathing through his clenched teeth. She sees the hunch of his shoulders and the way that he is pressing his hand to his chest and she knows, somehow, that this is a tipping point. That he will give up, right here, right now if she lets him.

Wouldn’t it be better for him? Wouldn’t they leave him alone if he just broke down and told them what they wanted to know? If he broke like she did?

But Dalien is selfish. She always has been. She doesn’t want him to give up because she doesn’t want to lose the only hope she has left. 

“Get up,” she snarls, almost surprised at the nastiness in her voice. She climbs to her feet, walks over to him, hauls him onto his bunk. “Get up, Andor. Get. Up.”

Andor blinks several times, staring at her with pain glazed eyes. 

“You’re not done, yet.”

“I-”

“No. You’ve got shit to do.”

Andor stares at her for a long, long moment. Then, a slow, horrible smile spreads across his face. There is blood in his teeth.

He says nothing, but his eyes are bright again, wild and a little crazy, but alive. He nods once, then lays back on his bunk, obviously in pain but making no sound. 

Dalien smiles back, even though his eyes are already closed, and she is sure her smile is just as crazy as his.

 

~~

 

Andor tells her stories that she knows aren’t true, but that she loves anyway. She knows that none of the people have their real names, knows that the places and the missions are lies, but she appreciates it nonetheless. She likes the feeling that something is happening out there, even if she will never be a part of it. 

She notices, however, that he is never the hero. He is there, of course, but he is always the spy, the killer. He is the knife in the dark, a good little soldier, always doing what he’s told. 

The stories feature all types, but most commonly, there is a team. There are two crazy old men. There is a droid and a pilot. And there is Stardust. 

Stardust, according to Andor, is strong and smart and lovely. She is tiny and fierce and anytime he talks about her, his eyes soften and his smile turns smaller, more genuine. Stardust is who Andor is fighting for and, in the dead of night, deep in her heart, Dalien envies her with a ferocity that startles her.

One night, after his story is over and they have lapsed into silence, Dalien whispers, “Is Stardust alive?”

It is a question that has been festering in her gut for a while and it is too large to ask in her normal voice.

Andor doesn’t answer for a long moment, so long that she wonders if he even heard her.

But finally, he whispers back.

“She better be.”

His voice sends a spike of cold shivering down her spine. Dalien looks over at him. In the dim light of the corridor, she sees the tightness of his jaw and the rage and terror flashing through his eyes before turning to horrifying blankness. She sees it, and she knows that, should the Empire take his Stardust, he would not stop until it is nothing but smoking, smoldering rubble at his feet. She knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Andor would make the stars run red with their blood and that, no matter how much they paid, it would never be enough.

She wonders, for a moment, if Stardust knows how much he loves her.

She wonders, just for a moment, what it would be like to be loved like that. 

 

~~

 

Andor asks her once why she’s there. 

She tells him that she has not heard from her parents in many years. That they were farmers in the Mid Rim their entire lives, never even leaving the planet. She tells him that, for all she knows, they are long dead. She tells him that she had a sister who died giving birth in a Outer Rim colony and a brother who lives for the glory of the Empire, that she curses him to the dead. 

She tells him of a dead husband, left unburied on a barren rock. She tells him that she fears that she will never see him in the Beyond because he is without purification. She tells him that she fears no purification will ever be enough to get her into the Beyond.

Andor stares at the ceiling. He sighs, a sad, resigned noise. He says something in a language she doesn’t recognise.

The words are soft and beautiful, well worn and he says them warmly, like he really means them.

“What does that mean?” she asks. She is not sure she wants to know.

Andor hesitates, brows furrowing slightly. 

“It...they are old words. They say, uh…’we mourn the forgotten dead and we pray God to give them the light of the stars to find the way home’. I...we said them back home.”

Dalien covers her face with her hands to hide the tears streaming from her eyes.

She doesn’t mention that the way he says “home” makes it sound hollow and dead. He doesn’t mention that she never answered his question.

 

~~

 

Andor wakes every night. Dalien knows because she learned long ago to not sleep if she can help it. Not that Andor sleeps much either.

But when he does, his eyes snap open and he gasps, almost silent. He doesn’t cry out or flail. He remains quiet and relaxed. But, even though he closes his eyes and breathes evenly, Dalien suspects that he doesn’t sleep again. 

She wonders what he dreams. But she never asks. 

 

~~

 

Dalien asks Andor how he lost his leg one day as he lays on his bunk, pretending he’s not still bleeding and shivering. He looks at her for a moment, then turns back to look at the ceiling. He wears a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes and a tension that she has never seen before. A tension that makes her wonder, again, what he dreams about. 

But he gives her a wry chuckle, eventually. He stares at the ceiling and weaves her a tale worthy of the Poet. There are blaster fights and narrow escapes and, in the end, he loses his leg to a displeased Wookie and barely makes it back to the Rebellion in a rust bucket of a ship, collapsing dramatically with the intel chip he fought so hard for clutched dutifully in hand. 

It is the closest he has come to a hero in any of his stories so far and Dalien laughs like she knows he had wanted her to.

But as the ‘troopers call up and down the corridor for lights out, she turns on her side and stares at him. 

“You’re a liar, Andor.”

“Yes.”

He meets her gaze steadily and, even in the dim light, she can see a cold, horrifying emptiness creeping into his eyes. He rolls over. He curls in on himself. Dalien hates herself a little for saying it, but she can’t quite crush her curiosity either. 

So she stares at him in silence until he lets out a tiny sigh.

“I fell.” 

Dalien wants to ask more, wants to push and learn the full truth of it, but she holds her tongue. She turns to face her own wall, pulls the rag of a blanket up to her chin.

She wants to know, but she also never wants to hear that cold, empty voice ever again.

 

~~

 

Every morning, Andor scratches a hash mark into the metal of his bunk with a tiny screw. He tells her that he is trying to figure out how long he’s been here because he will owe each member of his team a drink for every week that he is gone and he is trying to brace himself for how much he will have to spend. He tells her, voice colored with fond exasperation, that the kriffers always order the most expensive shit they can when it’s his turn to buy.

He laughs as he says it and neither of them mention that with every passing day, rescue gets less and less likely. That every time the ‘troopers come for him, he steps just a little closer to his finish line.

Dalien doesn’t say that she hopes they never come. That she is, above all else, selfish, and she can’t bear the thought of being left alone again.

 

~~

 

The days turn into weeks, the weeks into months and the ‘troopers come less and less for Andor. Dalien tells him it’s because he’s just too kriffin’ ugly for them to stand anymore. He laughs and tells her that maybe they just finally got it through their helmets that he was never going to give them anything and they got tired of getting their asses handed to them by a skinny rebel.

She doesn’t say that she thinks that the real torture has only just begun. That, without the constant fight, he would realize that nothing any ‘trooper could ever do to him could begin to come close to the knowledge that he had been left behind.

She tells him, no, ‘troopers are always getting their asses kicked by skinny rebels and they haven’t packed it in out there, so it had to be his face. Andor grins, a nasty, triumphant thing that makes her stomach flip in excitement and fear. 

“I think it was my sparkling personality,” he shoots back, and Dalien thanks the Poet that the ‘troopers put him in her cell.

Because she’s crazy, she has to be, but at least she’s not alone. 

 

~~

 

One night, as she lies on her back, staring up at the darkness above her, listening to the distant generators and the intermittent clacks of the ‘troopers boots and Andor’s slow, even breathing, she asks him a question that has sat on her heart since they first put her in here. 

“You ever think there’s a place beyond this one?” Her voice is soft, a scared sort of quiet. 

Andor sighs, rolls over.

“What? A different prison? I doubt it.”

“No.”

Dalien is choking on her fear, on her desperate need for him to understand.

“You mean...like. Beyond, beyond.”

“There’s...there has to be somewhere else, right? Somewhere where there’s...something more.”

Her eyes are burning, she ignores it, like she ignores the tightness of her lungs and her fists, clenching around her blanket.

“Justice?”

“I guess.”

Andor falls quiet.

“Do you? Is there justice for you?”

“I hope not.”

There is another long silence. 

“There has to be forgiveness, right?”

“I don’t know. Not for men like me.”

Dalien ignores the stinging behind her eyes as Andor turns his back, curling into himself. She closes her eyes, but sleep never comes.

 

~~

 

The days pass slowly, they always have, but now, it seems somehow worse. Andor is obviously waiting for something, someone, and, as time goes by, Dalien gets more and more annoyed by it. 

They play stupid guessing games, they tell each other ridiculous stories. But time still feels like a crushing weight, boredom creeping into everything they do. Dalien hates it. 

She hates that he still expects to get out. Hates being bored. She hates how he talks less and less with every day and the way he’s twitchy and restless, pacing the cell until Dalien is sure that there is a groove worn into the floor. She hates her traitorous heart, insisting on loving a man when it knows damn well that it will never happen. She hates Stardust, whoever she is. 

But Dalien says nothing. She just watches him pace and lets her hate keep her warm as the nights get colder.

 

~~

 

She thinks that her love for him is convenient. He’s there, and he’s the closest to kind she’s had in a long time. He reminds her of the fight that used to live in her bones. He is trustworthy enough that she sleeps more and he forces her to care.

For the first time in many, many years, he lets her remember.

She dreams of her parents, sitting in their old chairs on their old porch, looking up at the stars and wondering where their children are. She dreams of her nephew and brother-in-law, of her sister, waiting for them in the Beyond. She dreams of her brother, though she wishes she wouldn’t.

And she dreams of S’shon.

She dreams of his easy smile, his gentle kindness, the gentle, easy way he loved her, simple and warm. She dreams of the way he would laugh and spin her into his arms to sway under the stars. She dreams of the way he died, unarmed and scared. She dreams of his eyes, his beautiful eyes, staring at an empty sky, cold and dead.

She wakes slowly, with tears on her face. 

 

~~

 

Andor is not S’shon and Dalien could not be more grateful

Andor is an asshole, all biting wit delivered with a wicked curl of his lip that sometimes makes her wonder how much he is actually joking. 

When he fights, it’s fast and brutal, it’s to win, permanently, to make anyone else who wants to try think twice. He is hard, suspicious. If something moves, he doesn’t trust it and every once in a while she’ll catch him reaching for a blaster that’s not there.

Dalien wishes she could explain to him what he has come to mean to her, but she has always been better with action than words and he has his Stardust. So, instead, she snaps at him right back. She is as mean and hard as he is, giving as good as he gets, both of them fighting for territory they don’t really want, just to keep the fire inside burning. 

She is beyond relieved to have her bones reminded of the battle they used to crave. She is crazy, and broken beyond repair, but she knows who she was, and that has to be enough. 

 

~~

 

Andor asks her, one night, what she’s going to do when she gets out of here.

“No one gets out of here, Andor,” is her answer. 

He gives her a wry, almost bitter twist of his lips that is too tight to pass as a smile and nods, like he had expected her to say that. 

“Humor me,” he says, voice full of something cheerful and painfully fake. “Say you get out tomorrow, what would you do?”

“Find the nearest real water fresher and stand under it for a full hour.”

“Fair enough.”

“And then I would go and say the purification for S’shon, even if it’s too late.”

Andor is silent for a good long while, just tapping his fingers against the side of his bunk.

“Would you ever consider joining the rebels?”

“What?”

“I mean, it’s not like you have any skills or anything. But we could always use someone to push a broom.”

He looks at her, expression serious, but eyes full of dark mischievousness. Dalien laughs. 

“You’re a kriffin’ asshole, Andor.”

His smile is tiny, but genuine this time. It tells her that he knows what he is and he finds it all incredibly amusing. She hates that it makes her heart flip. 

“I have skills.”

“Yeah? Like what?”

Dalien freezes, horror crashing through her. All she can imagine is the way he would look at her if he knew. She can’t lose him, not now.

“Yeah. I can knit like a pro,” she says, to cover the pounding heartbeat in her ears.

Andor huffs a small laugh, then rolls over, away from her. 

_ He shouldn’t turn his back,  _ her mind screams.  _ Not on me, not on me. _

Dalien wrenches her eyes from his back to the gray above her. She dreams of fire and blaster bolts and she wakes up screaming.

 

~~

 

She thinks about his offer a lot. She wonders what it would be like to have a purpose again, what it would be like to be a part of something.

She thinks that it could be nice, to care and be cared about. She thinks that perhaps she has forgotten how to be kind, that her bones have forgotten how to be warm. It would be nice, she thinks, to come in from the cold. 

She thinks that, if they knew, if Andor knew, she wouldn’t make it out of this cell.

She wonders, sometimes, why the troopers didn’t just put her in front of the firing squad in the first place. She wonders if what she has now isn’t the harsher punishment. 

 

~~

 

“Explosives.”

The word escapes one night, without her thinking about it. It rips a hole right through her, but it’s too late.

Andor gave a confused hum, turning to look at her. His eyes rip the hole even wider. She wants to run, to hide, but there is no where to go.

“What about them?” he asks.

“I used to be...very good at them.”

She can’t meet his eyes. She hates it, curses herself a coward. But she doesn’t look.

“They catch you with some? That why you’re in here?”

“No. They...no.”

“Okay.” Andor’s voice is carefully casual, measured and even. It tells her that she could stop now and he would drop it. 

But the words have started, and now, no matter the consequences, they won’t be stopped.

“It started small, you know? Attacking convoys, blowing holes in the hover car lines. They would push and we would push back. And with every new thing we did, I...well. And then, there was an Imperial, an officer. High ranking, very important to keeping my people quiet as the Empire came through, you know? And we…  _ I _ got tired of it. I had a team and the officer had a daughter. She was… she was sick. Really sick. And she was in this hospital. So I blew it up. It was only supposed to be that one part, but I was sloppy and I hit a fuel line. And I killed everyone.”

Andor is silent, and that terrifies her more than anything.

“S’shon didn’t know. He didn’t know I was going to do it. He didn’t know, but he was my husband so they shot him dead. And they threw me in here and I deserve it.”

“Yes,” Andor whispers and that one word shatters her. Tears spring, unbidden, into her eyes and she almost chokes on a sob. 

He says nothing more and all she can see is S’shon, lying in the dust.

 

~~

 

They barely speak anymore. There are no more stories, no more silly games, and that hurts, aches deep in her chest.

The days wear on. And on. 

She doesn’t know if he hates her. But how could he not? Even S’shon, the best man she had ever known, the one who had loved her, even he had hated her in the end. How could she ask Andor to not?

He ignores her, as much as he can in their tiny cell, and she realizes that he doesn’t even know all of it. Doesn’t know about the thief in her first cell or how she laughed as the fires burned. He doesn’t know that the only true guilt she feels is for S’shon. 

She knows he is right to hate her. And she hates herself for wishing he wouldn’t. 

 

~~

 

“I’ve never killed a child,” Andor says, and she is almost startled by it, after so many days of silence. “It would have made me just like them.” His voice is completely empty, almost monotone. He is turned away from her, so she can’t see his face. But it doesn’t matter.

 

~~

 

The entire building shakes. In the distance, there is the sound of blaster fire and running ‘troopers. The main lights cut out, the dim emergency lighting flashing to life.

Andor gets to his feet, a wide smile, happier than any she had seen before, splitting his face. He moves to the door, just as a security droid comes into view. 

Dalien has seen many over the years, but this one is slouching, moving more smoothly, more like a human. Andor laughs, just a little, like maybe he is not believing what he is seeing.

The droid stops in front of the door and tilts its head slightly, as if trying to decide whether or not to shoot Andor. 

“Hello, Cassian,” it says, and Dalien thinks it sounds pleased to see him. 

“Hello, Kay.” Dalien almost jumps in surprise. Andor’s accent is different, something strange, probably Outer Rim. But, as he continues, she notices that it sounds much more natural, as if the one she had known was just not quite right. “What took you so long?”

Kay tilts its head again, and Dalien somehow thinks that it would be rolling its eyes if it could.

“This prison is very well hidden.”

Andor- Cassian laughs, a brilliant, joyful thing and Kay rips the key panel out of the wall. The door slides open and Cassian steps into the hall.

There is a flash of movement, coming rapidly at them, and a woman’s voice shouts, “We gotta go!”

She skids to a stop beside Cassian. 

She is tiny, this woman, fierce and lovely, even with the horrific scars covering the whole right side of her face and head and the sleek black eyepatch over her right eye. 

She says nothing more, just looks Cassian up and down, clinically, but caringly, as if checking for obvious injuries. She nods, satisfied, when she’s done, then pulls Cassian down for a swift, harsh kiss. 

Kay lets out a noise that reminds Dalien of a sigh and looks away. 

They pull apart, slightly, and Dalien looks harder at the woman. She sees the fire in her eye, the strength in the set of her jaw. She sees the violence carved into her and the desperate, all consuming love in the way she presses their foreheads together and the way she sighs like she hadn’t been able to fully breathe before now. 

This is Stardust, and that makes Dalien want to laugh and maybe cry. How could she have ever thought that what she felt for Andor could rival Stardust? No, Dalien’s love was paltry, insignificant, a weak, flickering candle trying to convince itself that it could compare to the inferno in front of her. 

The woman threaded her fingers through Cassian’s, handing him her blaster and drawing another from a holster at her hip. 

“Did you miss me?” she asks, lips curling upward with amusement and palpable relief.

“Ah,” Cassian murmurs, looking at her like she is the only thing in the galaxy that matters. “Only a little.”

She laughs and looks at him like she wants to kiss him again. Instead she looks down at their entwined hands. 

“We need to go.”

And, together, with the droid right behind them, they take off running down the hall. 

Dalien goes to the door and watches them leave until they disappear from view. Andor does not look back.

The door is open. In all the chaos and fighting, she could probably make it to the hangar and a ship before anyone could stop her. The door is open. She could just go.

Dalien turns around and lies down on her bunk.

**Author's Note:**

> First and foremost, I want to give the biggest thank you in the world to Welcoming_Disaster! I never would have posted this without your help and encouragement!
> 
> Second, I didn't realize what a pain in the you-know-what formatting would be, so I apologize if it looks a bit wonky
> 
> Last, and certainly not least, thank you for reading this! It's my first time ever posting something online, and if you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a comment or kudos. It would mean a lot!


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